S4 ● E86 "Yeah BUT".... that old 'free labour' card

Today's video is addressing a bit the thing that comes up for some people about free labour. And Patrick the beekeeper is here and he's saying he's been having a lot of conversations with Swedish agricultural boards, some of whom have reflected back that this farm works because of the people here and free labour. And I think, to be honest, it's total bs. I want to address that here. So these are really complex questions. We do have a lot of people here and that does make certain jobs easier.

But to be honest, it mostly makes.

A lot of jobs harder or take a lot longer.

And I've given examples in other videos.

Like I move the eggmobiles and feed and open the nest boxes in 20 minutes on my own. It takes longer than that every single morning of the internship because there's too many people on the job now. They're here to learn and that's what we're doing here. And that's fine. But I do constantly emphasize to people about time and motion studies and learning to do things efficiently for yourself, because in reality that's really what makes it function for me.

If you can do a job quicker and more efficient, then it gives you time. And time is what we're usually lacking. So that's a really critical part of our success.

The farm has been paying for full time wages and it needs full time.

Wages to run the current enterprises. If you look at hours involved now, I've broken that down in videos before.

And it's something we're very open about. And I'd say probably more open than.

Any farm putting out videos like this. We're not talking about gross profits, we're putting out all the numbers and we share that very openly with the course participants here because it's that back end.

The decision making and financials that really make it work.

And it's usually the weak link. When I've done a lot of consulting.

Work in the past, it's usually decision making, business planning that is the weakest link. Most places have land, access to resources, etc. And those two things are usually the weak spots. Having a lot of people around does mean we get some things done that we wouldn't prioritize otherwise. Next year we're shifting the business.

I've invited a few of the core people here to come into the business and profit share basically.

And it's a way of me rewarding.

People that I love to work with and that have stepped up multiple times.

Many, some of them multiple years now.

And making them more than employees. I don't Want to give shares of the business away. I've invested my time and energy in building that up and all the branding of that and etc. You know, it doesn't feel appropriate to bring people in at this point into, you know, ownership of the business. But I would like to share profit, share the enterprises so we design and manage equally with equal responsibility that we all rise and fall together. And I think that's a lovely offering that I can give where some of.

The key people can come straight in.

At the enterprise level and be responsible for managing as well as responsible for earning their wages. I think the plans I have currently for next year is, you know, ample to pay four full time year round salaries for essentially eight months work, which would give all of us three months paid holiday off farm at a good wage, at a Stockholm sort of wage. And I like this. It's a way of growing the farm without me having to do all the sort of bulk end planning and work of that. I want to make the business resilient by having other people as, you know, some of the key people here really take a lot of responsibility and I'd like to honor that by making them more permanent fixtures in the business. And I'm moving away from having internships and education programs and moving towards more solid long term relationships because that's what I value. And I really like farming. I've had a really good time during the internship which is coming to a close this weekend. But I love farming and getting out and solving problems and grafting. I love doing a hard day's work. It feels really nourishing. So I've gone a kind of different route to most people in this field who sort of get comfy with teaching and doing that sort of stuff as their primary income. I've gone the opposite way and relinquished a business that turned over a lot of money without much expense or risk to farming for a living. So some people have said like, oh yeah, but you, you're not fully counting in free labor or the reality of the economy of that. But the economy as we run it, the education accounts for just under 30% and the business works without it. That allows us to do projects like build a new pond for the sake of the interns learning about the construction of a pond. We'd like to do that anyway, but it's not necessary for us to do it doesn't bring any monetary value. It's that ability to put surplus in back into the business. It's not like we're drawing that out as paychecks. Johanna and I have very small personal needs and we have freezers and fridges full of food that, you know, we don't actually need a lot. I think our costs in the winter for the entire six month winter, about.

1/3 of one month costs in the.

Summer when there's a lot of people here.

It costs a lot of money to have people here.

People don't understand that, I guess we feed only organic or biodynamic food and pastured meats. We eat very well. And the cost of having people is very hard to factor into a business plan.

I've been trying to wrap my head.

Around that for several years, but it's difficult.

I can plan for a few things.

That get broken and wear and tear, but many things happen that you couldn't anticipate. And this year the food budget has gone up by about half. And I'm okay with that. It's costing me a bunch of money that I hadn't planned into the business plan. But we have a bit of flexibility, we can do that. And I really value the food that the chefs have been making and that's really great. But this morning we had an accident.

So unfortunately, a little oversight of not opening the nest boxes has led to the hens trying to find a safe.

Space to lay their eggs.

So they crowded behind the nest boxes and squashed each other to death. We lost 48 birds this morning just from a fleeting mist. Thought of not opening the boxes. 50 birds, well, what's that worth? It's actually surprising because it's not just the cost of the bird which we recoup. We buy these birds at point of lay hens, so that's about seven and a half euros a bird with transport. And they're point of lay birds, so it's impossible to replace them during the season. But they're also laying eggs until next April. Now they're laying about 90, 95% at the moment.

And that will go down during the.

Winter, but I would expect 80, 85% throughout the winter that actually the eggs from 48, hence quite a lot. It's about 3000 Euro lost today represented here. Now that's not something I'm going to ask that intern to pay for. Now I also need to take responsibility because my job is double checking everything.

But in a place like this, with so many enterprises going on, so many.

People, it's impossible to check everything all the time.

I often go out on a late night foray around the farm to check.

If the water's full for the animals. The broilers I've often found boiler water is not full up or things like this. So I'll take responsibility for that. And obviously I'll cover that cost. And that person will not forget that for a long time, I'm sure. And that's the learning. We need to extract the learning out of this. Now, obviously, it's a very serious matter and that person's probably going to have a lot of emotional, you know, thing.

To carry with them, but that's fine.

As long as we extract the learning. That's what we're doing here. We need to have these opportunities to learn because with livestock, it's a very big commitment. You can't be late, you can't. You know, certain animals need that rhythm, like cows, for example. But also, it's really important that we show up. You know, it doesn't matter if we're tired that morning, we still have to show up. The livestock here must take higher priority than our own needs. If you keep an animal in a fence or in a cage, you just put its needs above your own. It doesn't matter if you're tired, you can't wake up. You must go water or close up that thing or whatever it is. So it's funny because this is one of the biggest accidents that's happened at the farm ever. And I feel very relaxed about it. I feel like as long as we can extract the learning out of that, then I can bear the brunt of that. But what it does make me feel like is like, hey, to people that comment out there about free labor, free things, it's not free labor. There's no such thing as free labor. I've written articles about this in the past, and I've explored the numbers with people in the past too, you know, but it leads to. When you have unpaid people who are learning, you get all kinds of mistakes, all kinds of little things happen. And you could say, well, that's down to management, but it's not really.

It's.

It's, you know, you can give clear instructions several times. One instruction I always give people here is to not walk over electric fences because it stretches down the net and it pulls on the top of a post and it wears that out pretty quickly. So a net that might last you five, eight years on your own lasts, you know, six months, maybe two seasons at the most. Now, I'm not all stimulated about this. I just think it's really important to talk about because unless you've really done this for yourself, I don't think you could really Understand the costs involved. You know, there's no such thing as free labor. If I was paying employee, I would expect, you know, a really high level of organization, a really efficient workflow. And that's the sort of people that have been showing up here that I want to invite into the business. People have been doing that for themselves, for their own learning. I talked in a video recently about the chicken processing and how I'm encouraging people to do time and motion studies for themselves. It's so important because, you know, this has become one of the most productive per square meter, diverse organic farms in Europe now. And it's through a lot of organization and planning and then executed hard work, you know, really hard work that's timed and intelligent, not just working hard for.

The sake of it.

And the key to that success has been the management and the planning and the detailed time and motion studies. And it's so critical that we do that. And then we can employ people and know what we're looking to achieve in a certain time frame or from that.

Employee or whatever it is.

So it's a really, you know, it's a heavy day, I guess, emotionally, and that's fine too. You know, we can just relax into those emotions too. But for me, it's a powerful day. It's a powerful learning opportunity to see, like, you know, there aren't many places where you could go and make that kind of mistake and it'd be okay. And it's totally okay. And, you know, the important thing is it doesn't happen again. So it will peak people's awareness to really think about what they're doing and what they're committing to when they take on livestock. Another such problem we had was with the boiler pens one time, and I've spoken about how we manage the boilers in other videos. But we have protection on one side longwise and one end, and then the other sides are open. So they must always be facing the prevailing wind. So we have a pattern of how we move them in front field, top field, and up field. And when you go around a tree lane, you have to turn them around so the protections on the right side still.

And unfortunately, a couple of years ago.

They were turned around and became like a wind trap. And we lost €1500 overnight. So that's another one of these examples where, you know, a split second of not thinking leads to, you know, a big loss of earnings, as it were. In that case, the birds were very young, which is why they were so fragile. But, you know, it's not time in our Short season. To replace those birds, we have to order the chicks three weeks in advance. And it was late in the season so we didn't have time to replace that. Another example of things that don't go to plan is with the willow. Here we have Viminalis, a hybrid willow. It's up at six and a half, seven meters now. And we have a basket tree willow, it's a lot shorter. And we had two bunches of two meter long cuttings that I asked people to split into 30 centimeter cuttings for planting. And within about 30 seconds I turned back and they're all mixed up. And the idea had been to plant the lower ones on the front side, higher ones on the backside. They were going to be alternately coppiced, but part of our ramp that we're creating with the alder here, which is.

Just shooting up now.

But that's, you know, that's some of the pros and cons of working with people. It's that, that people come with all different levels of awareness, experience, etc. And it costs money. It's not free to have free help, as it were. It's a choice I still make. You know, I've been making it all these years because I really value the learning opportunity and you know, it's hard to plan for sometimes and can be frustrating at other times. But it's, you know, I'm not talking about this to, you know, point blame or criticism on anyone. We have to learn and we need places where we can do that. For me, this place is becoming a place that's so valuable in its productivity as an example of small scale ag that I want to shift it away from people learning from nothing to people learning to hone and perfect the maintenance and planning and monitoring of these systems because I think it will be more valuable. There aren't many farms able to show an economy like we are on the land through land based enterprises and such high productions per square meter. And I think it's really important that the business shifts now to make it more resilient in the manner I've been saying. I think it's very complex to run enterprise like this where learning is a high objective as well as high production because it's a fine line between giving people freedom to allow them to learn and really get a lot from that experience, but also keeping things in check. So we have quite strict ground rules. My experience working with groups is you need to tell people a bunch of times some things, simple things like please don't walk over our fences and In a group setting, it takes, you know, five, six times of saying that and still someone will think that you're not keeping your eyes peeled and do what's more convenient for them. And it's something, you know, I've learned to. I'm very aware what goes on and I have other eyes and ears on the ground. And it's interesting process, this group psychology and the patterns of group behavior. And I think it's, you know, anyone working with that will be well aware of, you know, the energy needed and the costs involved with that. So I just wanted to speak a bit to that because I think it's very easy for people to look at it too simplistically and not take everything into account there. And it's very complex stuff and it's. You need a lot of energy and insight to run that effectively. At the same time as, you know, really focusing on production as well. That's also true to say like some things get half done. You know, many things get half done in a way that you would expect a lot higher, you know, level of care from employee or something. But also things get. Things take a long time sometimes when learning is at a high objective and that would be uneconomic. You know, it works for us because we have enough people, people to cover the enterprises and give time for those things. But it's very complex and dynamic and we talk about this stuff a lot because it's what we're doing every day here. But I think there's no right way to do it, that's for sure. I'm moving towards more full employees or people responsible for the business because I just see that ultimately that brings more stability and resilience, which is what I'm after. Because ultimately a lot of the responsibility falls back on me or a lot.

Of the cost, or all of the.

Cost falls back on me. And it's okay because I have ways of producing additional incomes that I can cover those sort of things. But it requires effort. And you know, I think on the other end of the spectrum is working with volunteers and short term volunteers is something we just wouldn't do because. Because it's too much effort. You need a full time person to manage those volunteers really. But having people just creates a lot of wear. When 10 people use a car, scratches and bumps happen and it's that thing. If you don't own it and you don't pay for it, responsibility is not fully there. So tools get damaged and books from the library get left out in the grass with the spine bent open. Things like that really bug me because it's like, hey, you wouldn't treat your gear like that. So, you know, you should treat other people with even more respect. And things like keeping the workshop tidy. I always, you know, quite strict about sweeping the floor and having the floor totally clear. But there's many times that things are not in place and this is not exactly how I would like the workshop. So I'll tend to come in at the weekend and sort it out and just let people know through demonstrating what I like or bringing it up in the group when it's important to. Now, I want to make it really.

Clear this is a public channel and we're very public with what we do. You know, we opened up our house and garden for six months of the year to people from all over the world. And it's not my intention to cause any discomfort. I feel very relaxed about what happened today. It's my intention to share what goes on here. And this is a part of what goes on. You know, things get damaged, things get lost, things get miscommunicated. And that's life, that's reality. It's important that we extract the power out of those things, things and really like talk about these things and find effective ways to avoid miscommunications. It's something that's been on my mind a lot this year and something that's making me consider part of next year's planning is like how to run our internship program. We had, I think, triple subscription on a waiting list for the internship, but I don't intend to run it in the same way again, I think. And I've been feeling like that, you know, in the past couple of seasons. I know it benefits some people very much and some of them go off and really start things up. But what I'd like to do is be on the ground full time farming myself. And the people learning here might come for six months as kind of like replacing our core team. We might have a few of us profit sharing, running the enterprises and managing everything, responsible for everything, and then have maybe four or six interns who replace the core team. And they come for six months and they must be ready to springboard. They must have a property they're waiting to develop and it will close the farm down a bit. There won't be so much opportunity for people to come in as there has been in the past, but it will meet my learning objectives, which is to support the people that will benefit most from that. And we will offer our online training and we'll offer probably shorter term trainings within the season. But we're talking a lot about the Pareto principle. We're talking about bees this morning and how breeding programs with bees have led to unintended consequences. And we've been talking about this a lot with, you know, how to plant trees, how to breed animals, how to work with people, and talking about leveraging. And the Pareto principle is this 80, 20 principle where, you know, businesses found 80% of their business came from 20% of their products or 80% of the complaints came from 20% of the people. And we were really drummed into this at Gaia University where I studied masters in ecosocial design and communication. And the idea is that, hey, if you can put out work 80% as good as your perfect work with 20% of the effort, then you get five times more done. And so this was something that aided me greatly in the Gaia University training was to smash up perfectionism. And you see, if you follow the farm like we're not aiming for perfectionism, we're aiming for optimization, efficiency, getting things out there, getting them done and refining them over time. And I think it's so healthy to smash up the perfectionism certainly for myself that I've been drummed into all my life. My creative process is so much more powerful now. I'm not aiming for any kind of perfectionism, but I am always looking to refine things, monitor them and you know, have rapid feedback loops. But that's the same with how I'm relating to education. It's like I don't have energy to keep up the pace I've been doing. I've been running full time, two full time lives each summer and then quite a hectic schedule in the winters just because I'm choosing to, but I'm choosing now not to do that so much. It's been very beneficial, I think overall I wouldn't change anything that we've done. It's been very powerful and very unique in many ways and a lot of people have really benefited from that. But I'm thinking now that I really want to focus in on.

A more.

Highly selective process and bringing people here that can really extract the juice out of what we're doing here because it's very special and it's a bit of give and take. We need people who are really stepping up and about to go off and start their own enterprises. So I'm not sure of the criteria yet, but it will be getting clearer over the winter and different next year. I hope that we just have a Small team on the ground. And I'm on the ground full time because that's really what I love to do.

So a very interesting day.

And yeah, again, my intention is not to make anyone feel uncomfortable in any way in this. It's all totally good and fine. It's part of the process we're doing here. We're engaged with every day here. And I just think it's interesting to share this stuff because people don't necessarily have any insight in what it takes to run a place like this, what it takes to budget and plan the economy. For having so many people on the ground and factoring in mistakes, I'm sure some others watching this have many people around. And I'd love to hear if anyone's got efficient ways to factor in wear and tear and breakages in the season because I just find it really challenging. It is very hard to predict. So you can plan contingency funds for it or whatever, but it never really works out. It's very different each year. So it's hard. But yeah, it's amazing that we can all communicate openly and freely about this stuff and sit with whatever's going on and just. Yeah, it's important that we share successes and failures because a lot goes really well here at the farm. But sometimes things happen like this and it's. It's important we get out of our little mind and emotion about it and see the bigger picture, see what we can extract from the learning.

I just want to be clear. This is not to put anyone on the spot. So please don't leave personalized negative comments that will be deleted and it's not appropriate here. If there's questions and comments that you have about things we're putting up, that's all good. But it's not a place for people to disrespectfully communicate or whatever. Like, I'm not pointing a finger and holding blame to someone. I'm interested in patterns, never individuals and what they're up to. I think it's important to study patterns. That's how we farm. So I just want to make that really expressly clear that it's just not appropriate on our channel to make personal comments and things like that. It's, you know, it's uninvited. Thanks for keeping it real there.

Here you have bee bread. It's fermented properly. You can see it's different colors. You see it. And this is very pedagogy because you have eggs very small, quite few millimeters only. And then you have different stages of Larva. Can you see it? It's small, small white eggs in the lower part of this comp. I think it's quite. It gets too dark when all. If you stand behind me over my shoulder, I probably would end a few at the time. Then you can see the eggs in the cell bottom. And there you have larva. Do you see the egg? And then you have this one. Ah, you have pre drilled it was too. This is the format. I have to go. And I take 1cm. I'm not following the edge of the follower board because then the cake will go straight into the wall. And then the bees will build it to the wall. I take a centimeter there. You can put it outside the follower board because they will clean it up and put it in again. And now I can take this one and put it in the hive. And now the identity for the bees is in the smell and the smell is in the comb. So the comb is also identity of the pollen. What do you say?

That although all that comb is full of some honey, but the darker yellow is broad.

Yes, yes, precisely. Yes. You can see it because you have a lid on every. Convex lid on every.

Oh.

Sorry. It's. It's a birth of a bee. Here, I have to show you. Here you have bees.

Wow.

Birth of a beast. She's just going out. And there you have one in earlier stage. Can you see her, Sam?